Occupational hazards

Shaw stands his moral ground in Mrs. Warren's Profession

by Steve Vineberg

MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Michael Walker. Set designed by Sarah Sullivan. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by AnnMarie Duggan. With Kippy Goldfarb, Annie Mosher, Steven Braddock, Scott Kealey, Matthew Amory, and John Davin. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through October 26.

Shaw wrote Mrs. Warren's Profession in 1894, in imitation of the social-problem plays of his hero, Ibsen, and it was a succès scandale. Ibsen had built an entire drama around syphilis, though the word itself is never mentioned in Ghosts; Shaw put his unmentionable into his title -- professionally, Mrs. Warren manages whorehouses. But Shaw's play hasn't aged well, and I don't think it's because we're no longer scandalized by prostitution. (We make enough noise when a madam to the stars is exposed, or when a famous actor is caught hiring a hooker.) Mrs. Warren's Profession, which is the season opener at Foothills, echoes the premise of Shaw's first stage effort, Widowers' Houses, from 1892. In the earlier work, a young man objects to living off the money that is his fiancée's dowry when he learns his prospective father-in-law manages slum houses for a living; then he discovers that his own aunt, whose money he himself survives on, owns some of those houses. In Mrs. Warren's Profession, the independent-minded Vivie Warren is shocked to discover that she was raised on the profit from her mother's houses of ill repute.

There's a big difference between the two plays, however, and it isn't to Mrs. Warren's advantage. The brilliant Widowers' Houses provides a romantic-comedy ending that can satisfy no one but the most undiscriminating sentimentalist; the essential conundrum remains unsolvable. Mrs. Warren tries that Shavian trick of making the devil's argument the most sensible when Mrs. Warren's business partner, Sir George Crofts, admonishes Vivie, "If you're going to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles, you'd better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of all decent society." But Shaw tips his hand by making Crofts a cad and giving Vivie a righteous stance no one can persuade her to climb down from. Mrs. Warren isn't a Shavian comedy of ideas (a problem play mixed with a comedy of manners) so much as high comedy that fogs into melodrama, like Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance. In fact, the big scene between Mrs. and Miss Warren that marks the halfway point seems to be an emendation of the mother-daughter encounter in Lady Windermere, which had been produced two years earlier.

The Foothills production doesn't take any of the stiffness out of the script. Except for Steven Braddock as Mrs. Warren's most innocent gentleman friend, Praed, the actors don't show much style or much warmth -- either of which might have been a worthwhile direction for a revival of this material to try. (Braddock, in his modest way, demonstrates both.) Michael Walker directs the key moments by the manual (like the one where Mrs. Warren can't resist bestowing a kiss on Vivie's young swain, the rector's son): you can see exactly what you're meant to see, you know what it's supposed to mean, but you don't believe a word. Kippy Goldfarb suffers most from this superficial approach. For an act and a half, she suggests a British Mae West; then, when Vivie forces her mother to admit who and what she is, Goldfarb shifts jarringly into Cockney and twists her mouth into a snarl. It's like a game of charades where, in the middle of the game, one of the players picks the card that says she has to impersonate a barmaid.

The abruptness of this switch prompted me to go back to the script -- and it's Shaw, more than the actress, who has to take the blame. His stage direction demands, "She suddenly breaks out vehemently in her natural tongue -- the dialect of a woman of the people -- with all her affectations of maternal authority and conventional manners gone, and an overwhelming inspiration of true conviction and scorn in her." I don't know how the hell you play something like that; this is Shaw the moralist talking, not Shaw the dramatist. (In his best works, of course, the playwright isn't divided down the middle.) But a better director would have searched for an equivalent, rather than simply reading off the text. Walker should have known that Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play you need to compromise with.